There are few things that cable news networks love more than a strong viewership figure — a fecal-themed disaster of some sort, perhaps? — but it's easy to lose perspective. Despite all the brouhaha that surrounds cable news ratings, there's a pretty basic fact that casts serious doubt on just how influential or relevant these channels really are. Namely: a really small percentage of Americans watch any of them at all.

But here's the thing: even at that level, it's a positively tiny percentage of the country. According to Deadline Hollywood, they drew 1.69 million viewers last week, a figure that annihilates their direct competitors — CNN and MSNBC notched just 523,000 and 516,000 respectively.

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But nonetheless, scraping up against the bottom of two million viewers isn't such a staggering thing. In 2013, according to U.S. census figures, the United States was home to over 316,000,000 people, and only about 242,753,607 of them were voting-age. Simply put, even if every person watching Fox News were both legally able to vote, their total viewership last week would be considerably less than one percent of the voting-age public — 0.69 percent, in fact.

This isn't to, say, deny that Fox News' ratings are impressive within their field, to be clear, or even within the realm of cable programming overall. It's more to point out that all of these channels are absorbed by a highly remote percentage of the U.S. public. It's easy to lose perspective on this, as the culture of cable news often feels rather insular, but it's true. And considering even further that Fox News has been dominating this battleground for well over a decade, there's no reason to think they'll have any more of an impact in 2016 than they did in 2012 or 2008 — not enough for conservatives, that is to say.